Randy Couture recently did an interview with Eddie Goldman to promoter new book The Last Round w/ Sara Levin. The book can be pre ordered now on Amazon.
“I think wrestling is just one of those sports that, once it grabs you, once it bites you … you’re forever, it never changes. I have a wrestler’s mind, I look through wrestler’s eyes, a wrestler’s mentality, and I transfer all those things and used all those things to become a Mixed Martial Artist and in MMA it’s the foundation for my fighting style ... those things will never go away. They become part of my character and part of who I am, so I think for that reason I’ll always be a wrestler.”
“Unfortunately, Title IX has been pretty hard on our sport over the years and I’ve done some fundraising and been involved in kind of raising some awareness about that and some of the college problems that have been put on the chopping block in recent years like Fullerton and University of Oregon’s program and others and hopefully, through Mixed Martial Arts I think we can turn the tide.
"It’s about the constituencies and what they want and I think wrestling is getting a better nod and being considered more of a martial art now than it ever was in the past because of our exposure in Mixed Martial Arts. In a lot of ways, MMA has become the professional outlet for amateur wrestlers and collegiate and now Olympic-style wrestlers alike and I think all those things are good but… you know, I don’t know what else we can do other than continue to educate people and turn them on to this sport of wrestling. It’s the oldest combative sport around for a reason.”
“I have my black belt from Neil Melanson; him and I worked very hard together in kind of developing techniques that comes from the wrestling world and implementing it into the Catch style. Obviously as a wrestler, you know, that’s where collegiate wrestling came from, from Catch as Catch Can, so it’s something I feel strongly about and I also see that as a big positive thing for collegiate-style wrestling and ultimately Olympic wrestling is kind of resurrecting the Catch style as the submission style for MMA.
"I think it’s widely used and grounded people just don’t the terms, they don’t know that’s the things they’re doing, we’ve gotten so caught in the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu style that we failed to overlook that the original combative sport in the Olympic games was boxing and wrestling and Catch wrestling, Pankration, all those things have a ton of merit. It’s just putting on the right glasses to look through the Catch wrestling in wrestling glasses instead of the Jiu Jitsu glasses and I think in a lot of ways I’m an example of the style and it’s success."
“I would like to see Neil develop either a book or some instructional tapes and help him kind of come up with an outline that, again, further educates on the style, how the style works, how it’s implemented into Mixed Martial Arts and the fight game as a whole.
“With Neil, we’ve had our first tournament at Xtreme Couture under the kind of Catch wrestling rules. Neil kind of came up with some rules and a scoring system that he thinks kind of epitomized what Catch is all about and I think we want to continue to build on that and make it a bigger, more annual type of event and just continue to, again, educate and foster this style.”
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